TL;DR
One of the most expensive silences in leadership is the one leaders keep about their own state. When a leader advises their overwhelmed team while privately going through the same overwhelm, the team senses the mismatch, and trust erodes without anyone being able to name why.
Inside this issue: One sentence a leader said quietly that changed how I think about what trust actually requires. What the Gallup data reveals about who is most depleted in the workforce. And what shifts when a leader stops performing a state he or she isn’t in.
“Deep in me, I’m the same.” She said it so quietly I almost missed it.
She had just spent twenty minutes describing what her team was going through. She talked about the overwhelm, the pace, and the pressure of a season that wouldn’t let up. She had been advising them for weeks, giving them language for what to prioritize, walking them through it with the composure her role required.
Then she said what she hadn’t been able to say to anyone else. “Deep in me, I’m the same.” She wasn’t coping any better than the people coming to her for help. She was continuing to advise them as if she were. She told me what she couldn’t tell them.
I see this across organizations constantly. Leaders who are going through the same thing as their teams while showing up every day as someone who has it handled. The advice they give is usually right. The problem is that the person delivering it is in the same condition as the people receiving it, and the team can sense the mismatch even when nobody names it. That mismatch is where trust starts to break down. The leader hasn’t done anything wrong. The team just stops believing the words because the person saying them doesn’t match the words.
When I was in the military, I learned early that your team reads you before they listen to you. They read your composure, your energy, and your pace before they hear a single word you say. And they compare what you say to what they see in front of them. When those two don’t align, the team doesn’t stop trusting your advice. They stop trusting you. And they never tell you that’s happening.
Gallup’s 2026 global workplace report found that manager engagement dropped from 31% to 22% in three years. The people responsible for advising and supporting their teams are now the most depleted group in the workforce. Organizations are asking them to perform composure and confidence every day while those same managers are going through everything their teams are going through, plus the weight of being responsible for other people’s experience on top of their own.
She said it to me because I wasn’t her team. The risk was lower with someone outside her organization. But she heard herself say it out loud, and that mattered. She had been treating her own overwhelm as something to manage privately so she could show up for the people who needed her. Once she heard it in her own voice, she could see what had been happening. Her team didn’t need her to have the answers. They needed to know she wasn’t pretending to have them.
I ask leaders this regularly: what are you going through right now that your team has already sensed but you haven’t said out loud? Every time, they can name it immediately. And every time, they’ve been spending more energy on the performance than the conversation would have required.
Your team already knows. They’ve been waiting for you to say it.
ANNOUNCEMENT: One more thing. I just turned in the final draft of my chapter for Luminaries: Women Leaders Who Light the Way. The book goes on sale July 7.
I wrote about the conditions inside organizations that force leaders to hold back a capacity their teams actually need, and what that silence costs the people who keep practicing anyway. Fifteen women, fifteen different experiences, and a pattern that connects all of them.
